Yuba City children’s venue cancels lock-in party that spurred COVID concerns
Update: Millennium Family Entertainment Center has canceled Thursday night’s lock-in party, the venue announced late Wednesday in a Facebook post.
Owner Sara Core told Fox 40 that her business received negative attention following media coverage. The Bee first reported the story Tuesday morning. Core also told the TV station that more than 150 people reached out for tickets to the event, also contributing to her decision to cancel because it was too many people.
Original story:
An entertainment center located in the county with the worst recent coronavirus numbers in California plans to proceed with a New Year’s Eve “lock-in” event, letting parents drop off teens and preteens for a late-night party later this week despite strong discouragement from the local health office.
Millennium Family Entertainment Center in Yuba City, which offers an arcade, laser tag, rock climbing and more, will let parents bring kids ages 11 through 17 on the last night of 2020 and pick them up in the early hours of 2021.
In a Facebook post Sunday, Millennium wrote that it was “nervously wondering” whether people would show up for Thursday’s four-hour event due to the “current crazy situation going on.” More than 100 users on the site indicated they were “interested.”
The “crazy situation” is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen about one in 19 Californians and one in 13 Yuba City residents test positive for the respiratory disease over the past 10 months, according to state and local health officials.
Health experts have long said the riskiest activities for COVID-19 transmission are those that are indoors, unmasked, last long periods of time and in which social distancing is a challenge. They’ve also urged against holiday gatherings.
Millennium’s lock-in event appears to check all of those boxes, except it requires masks, according to an online event description. But it’ll also serve food, meaning masks will have to come off at some point. The description says social distancing is “encouraged” and attractions will be sanitized between uses.
“Such an event is not permissible under the state order, and the local advisory makes it very clear that such events put the greater community at risk for spreading the virus,” Yuba County spokeswoman Rachel Rosenbaum wrote in an emailed response to The Sacramento Bee about the venue’s party.
But Millennium’s owner, Sara Core, disagrees with the advisory and state orders, and believes her event will be safe due to mask use and sanitation. In an email to The Bee this week, she confirmed her business plans to go forward with the “private event” and defended the decision to do so.
“We take every precaution to be safe for our employees and customers, with strict covid prevention protocols in place and a drastically reduced capacity,” she wrote. “We have customers that want us to be open. We will be here for them, to provide safe fun, as long as we can.”
Core’s view is one shared by many business owners across California who have had to endure nearly 10 months of changing restrictions and shutdown orders in response to the devastating and deadly coronavirus crisis, which has killed close to 25,000 Californians.
In July, Core posted a 15-minute video titled “Let my business live!” to Facebook and YouTube, pleading the case for small businesses to be able to stay open with modifications and outlining the financial devastation they face if they close down.
“Most of us are smart enough to figure out how we can make it work safely,” she says in the video. “Why should we be punished, and our businesses be closed, many of them for good? I just don’t understand how that makes sense.”
Restrictions have tightened multiple times in response to California’s worsening surge of infections, which took root in early November and has since escalated, with nearly 600,000 of the state’s 2.1 million all-time cases pouring in over the past two weeks.
By mid-November, the state demoted the vast majority of counties back down to its strict purple-tier business and activity restrictions in an “emergency brake” move intended to slow the spread. In early December, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a region-based stay-at-home order, putting counties in even stricter shutdowns once their geographic region drops below 15% ICU availability.
The Greater Sacramento region, which includes the Yuba-Sutter bi-county area, entered the state’s new stay-at-home order on Dec. 10 and must stay in it through at least Thursday. The order directs non-essential businesses to close temporarily.
Even prior to the new restrictive measures, venues like Millennium didn’t have the state’s OK to be open in Sutter County. Within the state’s color-coded reopening framework introduced at the end of August, indoor entertainment businesses are only supposed to be open, with modifications, in the looser orange and yellow tiers, into which Sutter has never been promoted because its virus metrics have been too high.
A primary complaint from business owners about California’s shutdown orders is that they allege the restrictions are arbitrary.
Critics — one of the most vocal among them being state Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, whose district includes both Sutter and Yuba counties — have questioned why the state has instructed various types of businesses to close without providing hard data linking them to increases in COVID-19 cases.
Much of that kind of data is unavailable because the coronavirus is a novel one, still being studied by experts simultaneous with its rampant, exponential spread.
COVID-19 surge slams Yuba-Sutter region
Yuba City is the seat of Sutter County, which recently reported the highest test positivity rate and fourth-most new cases per capita among all 58 counties statewide, according to California Department of Public Health data released last week.
For the most recent week surveyed, 24% of diagnostic tests in Sutter returned positive, nearly double the statewide average of 13% and triple the 8% cutoff for California’s purple, or “widespread,” risk tier.
While the 13-county Greater Sacramento region had nearly 17% ICU availability as of Monday, the state reported that Adventist-Rideout in Marysville — the only general acute hospital within Yuba-Sutter — had 14 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, leaving just one ICU bed available.
Hospital spokeswoman Monica Arrowsmith confirmed to The Bee that the California National Guard has assisted Rideout’s emergency department “for several weeks” amid the surge, and will likely continue to help through next week.
Sutter and Yuba counties, which combine for a population of about 185,000, on Monday surpassed 10,000 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,000 in Yuba City residents. About one-quarter of the two-county total has come in the past two weeks.
Health officials have for weeks blamed the start of the current surge on private, in-home gatherings — especially on and around Thanksgiving — in which people have been lax about mask use and social distancing, rather than reopened businesses.
But state health chief Dr. Mark Ghaly has reiterated numerous times that even if parties and get-togethers were the original cause for the surge, COVID-19 rates have grown so substantially that every activity involving people outside of one’s own household is much riskier now than earlier in the pandemic.
That’s little consolation for struggling business owners, who have also taken issue with the state’s essential vs. nonessential distinction.
Core believes her business to be essential.
“I would love to tell you the story about the sisters that somehow managed to open this amazing place and about all of the things we have done for the schools, churches, special needs groups, and military families in our area,” she wrote in her email. “I would tell you about the amazing employees that have come through our doors and moved on to better things with management experience and an amazing first job experience.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2020 at 11:02 AM.
